Around the Web; Steve Jobs Memorial Edition

Note: I’ve been overwhelmed with work lately and have fallen behind on the comment threads. I will get to comments on the Anti-Cancer and Q&A threads as soon as I can.

Appeal for Help: One of our readers is a dear lady in Queensland, Australia, near Brisbane. She is a chronic disease patient and housebound. She would like to have an assistance dog for emotional support, and would like to have a puppy that she can train. Australian law requires housing units to permit certified support dogs, but her housing complex is denying permission for a puppy that is not yet certified. If any Australian lawyer would be willing to provide her with advice on her legal rights pro bono, please send an email to pauljaminet@perfecthealthdiet.com and I will put you in touch.

[1] Jimmy Moore’s symposium: I’d like to thank Jimmy Moore for organizing his symposium on “safe starches.” It’s a great topic and only Jimmy could have brought together so many interesting people to discuss it.

It might have worked better if I had been able to provide some background to the panel. As it was, too many of the responders were unfamiliar with what we mean by “safe starches” and many may have supposed that our diet was designed for diabetics.

Kurt Harris did yeoman’s work this week, commenting on my post, Jimmy’s, and threads on PaleoHacks. It was great to have someone of like mind taking the time to comment. Thank you, Kurt, Melissa Hartwig, Emily Deans, Praguestepchild, and everyone who wrote supportive comments.

Some humor did come out of the discussions. My favorite was a PaleoHacker consoling Jack Kruse: “It’s just pillar envy, Quilt.”

I expect to post my reply on Tuesday.

[2] Music to read by: Brook Benton and Dinah Washington have what it takes:

[3] Interesting posts this week: Michael A Smith of Critical MAS tests our ideas about ketogenic fasting and finds that he can eliminate hunger while fasting by eating coconut oil and fermented vegetables.

Stephan Guyenet continues his series defending the food reward hypothesis of obesity. JS Stanton of Gnolls.org has been doing a closely related series, here’s his Part VI which explains key concepts relating to food reward, and has links to Parts I through V. Part IV was my favorite.

Two economists took their hand at finding the cause of the obesity epidemic. The biggest cause they found? Declines in smoking rates, which explained about 2% of the weight gain since 1979.

Peggy the Primal Parent has had a fascinating experience with gut dysbiosis. Fiber and fructose give her hypoglycemic episodes, but pure glucose doesn’t.

Bruce Charlton notes that scientists tend to develop theories into taboos, so that “using the taboo concept in reasoning triggers nerves and hormones and alters the body state to feel bad.” This may explain the reaction of some low-carb gurus to the word “starch.”

Frank Hagan of Low Carb Age dissects a study we mentioned last week, that recommended a diet of 1/3 carb 1/3 protein 1/3 fat. Turns out they found that 1/3 carbs is better than high carb, but didn’t have any data to show that lower carb was worse.

Mark Sisson at Mark’s Daily Apple has been holding reader video contests and has a ton – metric ton even – of reader workout and food videos. “Tuna Tataki with Gazpacho” won the prize for best recipe video.

Peter of Hyperlipid blames the Denmark saturated fat tax on Unilever. This story he linked says that Denmark has a low obesity rate – below 10%. Look for that to change now that saturated fats are more expensive.

Via John J. Ray, the sad story of a 25-year-old woman who killed herself with cough medicine. The acetaminophen was destroying her liver, but she thought she had a cold and kept taking more.

At PaleoHacks, a healthy 34 year old had a heart attack. Did his doctors misdiagnose a protozoal infection?

[4] Cute animal photo:

[5] Remembering Steve Jobs:

Steve Jobs passed away Wednesday night. When we got the news, we had just finished a dinner with the Living Paleo in Boston group and Julie Mayfield, author of Paleo Comfort Foods. We stopped at Shou-Ching’s office so that, coincidentally enough, she could finish submitting a pancreatic cancer grant application before a midnight deadline.

A commenter asked if I had anything to say about his health history. No; we don’t know the causes of Jobs’s cancer, and have no reason to assume he wasn’t following the best available health advice. Indeed, he survived pancreatic cancer longer than most.

We’ll remember Jobs as the greatest entrepreneur of his time, a man who did exactly what Apple’s ads said: “push the human race forward.” If you doubt how far the human race has come, watch the 28-year-old Steve Jobs introducing the “insanely great” Macintosh computer:

Several years ago, Bridget Donovan, who has now been dubbed “The Lemon Tree Lady,” purchased a Meyer lemon tree from meyerlemontree.com. A resident of Wisconsin, Donovan purchased the tree legally and in full accordance with all federal and state laws regulating citrus transport, and had lovingly cultivated and cared for her indoor citrus plant for nearly three years.

Then, out of nowhere, Donovan received an unexpected letter from the USDA informing her that government officials were going to come and seize her tree and destroy it — and that she was not going to be compensated for her loss. The letter also threatened that if Donovan was found to be in possession of “regulated citrus” again, she could be fined up to $60,000.

Donovan was shocked, to say the least, as her tree was not a “regulated citrus.” The store from which she purchased it is fully legitimate, and she had done absolutely nothing wrong. But it turns out Donovan and many others who had also purchased similar citrus plants had faced, or were currently facing, the very same threats made against them by the USDA.

Most of those targeted simply surrendered their trees without trying to fight back, Donovan discovered. And while she, herself put up a hefty fight in trying to get honest answers in order to keep her tree, Donovan was eventually forced to surrender it as well. And worst of all, many of those who were told that a replacement tree would be in “compliance” later had those trees confiscated, too.

Why has the USDA been targeting lemon tree owners? The answer is unclear, other than that they are a supposed threat to the citrus industry. And a USDA official admitted to Donovan that the agency has been spying on those suspected of owning lemon trees, and targeting all found to be in possession with threats of fines and raids if they failed to give them up — and the agency has been doing this without a valid warrant.

One of the comments: “First they came for the raw cow’s milk and I didn’t speak out, as I prefer raw goat’s milk. Then they came for the vegetable gardens in the front yards and I didn’t speak out, as I have my vegetable garden elsewhere. Then they came for the citrus trees and I didn’t speak out, as I prefer someone else to squeeze them …”

We had great comments on both sides of the food reward issue. The general consensus: Perfect Health Dieters have substantially reduced food cravings and appetite, and can easily ignore most junk food, but there are still some combinations of food that create cravings or addictive eating. Here’s Stabby:

I have been eating the PHD for a while, and it has really reduced any sort of cravings and tendency to mow down, even if the food is really yummy. But indeed, I will down a bag of potato chips in an instant, because it is just that cracktastic, pretty much designed to stimulate me in every possible way.

I’ve tried to lose weight by going low carb. The weight losses were successful, but I didn’t stop craving high carb/sugary stuff and would always gradually go back to the bad old ways and gain the weight back.

One year later strictly following the PHD, I lost almost 40 lbs and not only don’t I crave carbs and sugar, I am actually repelled by the smell of a bakery. Yeast and cinnamon are off putting.

After approximately six months of PHD I have zero craving for sweets and have easily resisted entire tables groaning with plates of cakes, doughnuts, cookies and so forth. Resisted is the wrong word though – it’s as if all desire for a (formerly craved) substance has left my body. I’m not sure if it’s related, but I have no desire to drink alcohol these days.

Because I had seen some positive changes in my blood sugar from incrementally increasing my starches (and also from the PHD regimen of supplements especially high dosage of iodine) I got carried away and thought maybe I was getting closer to perfect and I could handle dessert type treats. It has only been two weeks, but I have been creating more and more of them. A bad sign.

The Maasai use feminine pronouns and articles for God. God’s name is “N’gai” or “En’kai” and other various spellings, where the “N'” is feminine. Phrases to describe God include “she of the black garment,” my mother with wet clothes,””she of the growing grasses,” and “she who gives life… the one who is fertile and brings fertility.”

When Paul Spencer asked the women if this indicated that God was female, they said “We don’t know, ask the men.” When he asked the men, they said “We don’t know, God is inscrutable.”

Been having some of your “neo-agutak” the past few nights. It’s actually kinda tasty! Haven’t noticed any improvements on top of my gains with Diflucan and starch but I already eat tons of spinach, some coconut oil and a lot of anthocyanin rich foods like purple potato and berries… but I am digging the combo of all 3 in bowl and the cranberries are refreshingly tart.

Ive just read a post on cancer.org that states "people with the highest vitamin D levels seemed to have a higher, rather than lower, chance of developing pancreatic cancer. In one study, smokers with higher blood levels of vitamin D were 3 times more likely to develop pancreatic cancer than those with low levels" Vitamin D doesn’t seem to be helping according to this research. So where does that leave us? Its seems counter intuitive that vitamins could cause problems rather than offer solutions to health problems. I’m not stating that the two are linked, merely that the research suggests there is some sort of relationship between vitamin D levels and pancreatic cancer

Thanks for the link, Paul. Better advice might be to just start with Robert McLeod Too bad McLeod’s stopped blogging, his knowledge of biochemistry and physics is deep and his calories-in-calories-out entropy post from way back is an absolute classic.

I just finished reading Jimmy Moore’s online symposium on whether or not safe starches exist, and I have to say, I came away almost speechless.

Were I not a reader of PHD, I would come away from that symposium believing that, among other absurdities, Paul Jaminet thinks fiber is fat, Paul Jaminet buys into the “cholesterol and saturated fat causes heart disease” paradigm, and Paul Jaminet is a hack with no scientific background or knowledge of current dietary science…

Jimmy can post what he likes, but I disagree with his assertion in the comments that as a “reporter” he is not responsible for the other participants’ views. When there are out-and-out falsehoods and misrepresentations such as those mentioned above, the editor of the site has a responsibility to raise it with the person “off line” before posting it verbatem. Just to be clear, I am not talking about the “comments” section (which tends to be more of a free-for-all), just the formal “responses” by the symposium participants.

Part of me thinks this was some kind of joke, and that Jimmy Moore has a bet with someone that he can make Paul lose his cool….

“I’ve been overwhelmed with work lately and have fallen behind on the comment threads”

Great to know you are having success with your work! But, it’s really, really impressive that you’ve been overwhelmed with your work and still have time to read soo much and make various comments around the web!

Regarding McLeod post, he wrote the following:

“If one believes that diseases of civilization (DOCs) are caused by chronic inflammation which is in turn caused by neolithic agents of disease (NADs)”

One recent study challanges this current view. Inflammation probably is not a cause of disease, but just a normal reaction of the body, while trying to heal:

“Increased low-grade inflammation in the body resulting from obesity is widely viewed as contributing to type 2 diabetes. Going against this long-held belief, researchers from Children’s Hospital Boston report that two proteins activated by inflammation are actually crucial for maintaining good blood sugar levels — and that boosting the activity of these proteins can normalize blood sugar in severely obese and diabetic mice.”

“This finding is completely contrary to the general dogma in the diabetes field that low-grade inflammation in obesity causes insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes,” says Ozcan. “For 20 years, this inflammation has been seen as detrimental, whereas it is actually beneficial.”

@Remnant, Paul lose his cool? Not possible. I have it on good authority that he’s spliced Steve McQueen’s cool gene into his DNA (it was the same lab that spliced Honey Badger into Kurt Harris’ genome).

I agree that it was clear Jimmy had something of an ax to grind and the way it came off wasn’t really fair-minded. Jimmy is a nice guy and I don’t think there was any malicious intent. Still, there’s no such thing as bad publicity and I think there’ll be ample opportunity for Paul to sort things out, for those that want to listen. I think the biggest problem was the whole sound bite question: safe carbs, yes or no. There’s no room for nuance there. Then the cancer ketogenic thing got thrown in, meh.

The story of the lemon tree lady is missing a few facts. The company that sold the tree should be the focus. They were too interested in making a profit and shipped unknowing customers lemon trees in violation of multiple quarantine laws. The government is slow and it took 3 years for them to track everything down. So why is the outrage not directed at the shady company?

The article was also written with a conspiracy tone. Example a “citrus watch list” give me a break. They have all the address this company sent trees in violation of the quarantine laws but its sounds more sinister to say “citrus watch list”.

Paul do you think its a good idea to ignore quarantine’s with respect to food diseases? What’s your thoughts on ignoring quarantine laws for profit?

@Mario, yeah I wrote that, you gotta problem with that? Wanna take this outside? You tawkin’ to me?

My take on that study, I don’t see this as some sort of paradigm shift–that’s the authors hyping themselves. There’s useful things that happen in an inflammatory response, that’s why the body does it in the first place, and bad things that happen in a chronic inflammatory response which shouldn’t occur. It strikes me that “increasing p38 MAPK activity” is about as useful as forcing the liver to produce less cholesterol, really an avenue to produce a drug when it would be a whole lot better to simply remove the source of the inflammation. To say that chronic inflammation is caused by NADs is probably presuming too much on my part. I see NADs at the beginning of the bad health chain, and DOCs and obesity (or is that also a DOC?) as the end negative result, with chronic inflammation, chronic infection, food reward, and probably other stuff thrown in as the middle somewhere in the cause-and-effect scenario, with things happening in parallel, tandem, recursively…something like that. At least that’s where I’m at as I write this.

Sorry too. I don’t follow your blog, so I didn’t realize you were joking!

But my point was not specifically p38 MAPK activity or a drug to boost it. My point was to emphasize that chronic inflammation may not be the cause of any disease.

It appears to me that it is just another body defense (like insulin resistance). The real cause of disease is, probably, gut/mouth disbiosis and/or gut permeability, caused basically by NAD, leading to chronic infections.

The study bellow exemplifies well this: full mouth tooth extraction leading to an impressive decrease in HbA1c:

I’m less keen on coconut oil for fungal infections now, but I still like Neo-Agutak as a ketogenic semi-fasting food.

Hi Sean,

Yes, Robert was one of my favorite bloggers. He was ahead of his time. I think he’d have more readers today.

Hi Mario,

I’ve always believed inflammation is generally a natural healing response to disease and thought “autoimmunity” and “destructive inflammation” are two of the most over-diagnosed analyses around. Immunosuppressant drugs must be among the most over-prescribed drugs in terms of ratio of failures to successes.

Hi James,

I’m not against quarantine laws, but how effective is a quarantine enforced 3 years later? And if being within 100 feet of an infected tree is enough for seizure, it could be that 99% of the trees were uninfected, they just happened to have once been within 100 feet of an infected tree in the Meyer Lemon Tree warehouse.

Since people having their trees seized had no idea why they were being seized, and there was no evidence of blight presented, I think we can guess that a lot of healthy trees were seized unnecessarily.

Nor can we know the company was at fault. A disease may have been first detected in a tree after it was shipped.

I have been a reader of your PHD blog for about 8 months now but have never posted. The information you provide your readers is priceless and greatly appreciated. I use to be a VLC follower and then strict believer in the militant paleo concept. Up to a point both concepts worked; likely because I use to consume about 1700 calories of carbs (bread, HFCS and etc.) a day and was about 40 pounds overweight.

Up to 6 or 7 months ago I was a huge fan of Jimmy Moore and Robb Wolf. I still enjoy listening and reading some of the information they provide but not as much as I use to. I first heard you on Jimmy’s podcast and thought, who’s the nut advocating eating white rice and potatoes :-).

You provide people with a scientific, NON dogmatic approach to living and eating healthy. From personal experience I have found that a lot of the VLC and hugely dogmatic paleo folks are similar to followers of a left or right wing religious sect. I purely draw this conclusion based on my past involvement in both.

I’m very skeptical that the real cause of DOCs are ready to be neatly sewed up as ‘gut/mouth disbiosis and/or gut permeability’, also, I’m extremely lazy, so I think we should agree to disagree on this.

My point was maybe you should check in to the story a bit more before spreading the propaganda. Citrus greening may not show signs for several years. So yes finally doing something after 3 years might have an impact. The Lemon Tree lady was given information on why the tree was being seized (covered by other news outlets). Her argument was the tree looks fine please leave me alone. The company admitted the fault and offered to replace trees for some people. The company also admitted to shipping diseased trees which prompted the usda to act. My only issue was the story you linked failed to cover the basic facts.

Mario, that’s a great paper, thanks for the link. Sean, I think Mario attributes most disease to chronic infections, he just believes the point of entry is usually the gut, and that a healthy gut is usually able to prevent infections.

Hi Jared,

Glad to have you on board! Thanks much.

Hi James,

Thanks, I’ve updated the post with a link to the citrus greening disease page.

Thanks for the link. I am a great fun of your blog since I found it a month ago. I have read Jimmy Moore’s symposium on safe starches and it’s a pretty interesting read. I have been doing the PHD diet for a couple of weeks now . . . have read the book twice already and trying to figure out what supplement to get from the list of recommendations you listed on the PHD book. I know how busy you must be and I greatly appreciate you taking the time to respond to all the comments/inquiries. I wanted to ask what supplements can you suggest for me in addition to this one multi-vitamin am taking right now . . . trying to get pregnant btw.

I would recommend eating beef liver once a week, which takes care of copper. I think magnesium is extremely important and my favorite way to get it now is via Epsom salt baths, or drinking a small amount of an Epsom salt solution, since that provides sulfur too which is important.

Next most important are vitamins D, K2, and A if that is insufficient in your diet. From the UK, which is northerly, supplemental D3 is very important. K2 is very important, especially in pregnancy – deficiency causes developmental disorders.

Next most important are selenium and iodine. Start with selenium, you can add up to 200 mcg to the 50 mcg in the multi. With iodine you can start by eating seaweed, it’s good to add inorganic iodine at some point, but start with a low dose and be careful to increase iodine very slowly. If you get pregnant, don’t change iodine dose any more. Thyroid stability is more important than more iodine. Don’t drop iodine either, for the same reason.

Vitamin C is desirable. I would also get some chromium which is missing from your multi.

The other one that’s missing from your multi and very important is choline. You can get this by eating egg yolks daily plus liver. Don’t go above ½ pound beef liver a week, but you can eat chicken liver in addition. I recommend 3 egg yolks a day. The liver and eggs will provide your vitamin A as well as your choline. If you don’t want to eat the eggs, supplement 500 mg choline.

Paul, thanks for the immediate reply. I have been eating 2 eggs everyday, egg white included, for the last 3-4 years but have changed eating the yolk only for the last 2 weeks. Will increase it to 3 as per your advice. I am also taking Vitamin C 500 mg in addition to the multi I am taking right now. Will order from Amazon through your link the supplemental D3, K2, etc. Thank you so much Paul.

Mario, I have never considered the inflammation from obesity to be the main cause of diabetes, there is evidence that it really isn’t a huge factor in the grand scheme of things. Guy who is going to lose his arm isn’t going to get out of it if he just loses his body fat, there is a bigger problem at hand.

That being said, absolutely excess adipose tissue contributes to diabetes. Tumor necrosis factor is specifically secreted in order to downregulate insulin receptor substrate 1 and cause insulin resistance. It is adaptive, and contributes to hyperinsulinemia which causes more storage of carbohydrates as fat. All of this is designed to make us accumulate and sustain adipose tissue so we don’t starve.

Judging by that article, all they showed was that some protein kinase has some roles in maintaining insulin sensitivity. Yeah, but what we’re talking about when we say that inflammation is a major cause of insulin resistance is excessive inflammation of a specific kind caused by the inability to regulate the inflammatory cascade so the various eicosanoids and cytokines and such aren’t expressed in as large quantities so as to be pathological. Ask Paul about infections, and leaky gut and endotoxemia and dysbiosis and such, the inflammation generated definitely contributes to diabetes.

Bottom line, “inflammation” is incredibly vague.

Oh gosh, I think I am going to stop reading health news. The vast majority of the articles are spun in a way that distorts the finding. “There are proteins that are associated with the inflammatory cascade that help to prevent endoplasmic reticulum stress” isn’t as eye-catching as “mwahaha, all you thought you knew is wrong!” I don’t even know all that much about biology yet and I’m smarter than these guys.

To clarify, I do think that inflammation is at the root of it, just not adipose tissue inflammation. And by “inflammation” what is meant is “chronic over-expression of various inflammatory cytokines on enzymes that regulate insulin sensitivity doing what they shouldn’t be”. p38 MAPK is part of the inflammatory cascade, and it helps protect the body, but that doesn’t mean that inflammation is benign, that would be the fallacy of composition, that says that we can say X about Y which is part of Z, therefore Z can be called X. We still want to keep the inflammatory cascade to a minimum because of the problems that certain parts of it cause.

Cause when they are over-expressed that is. A lot of people in this community, including myself tend not to be specific about what inflammation means, we say “inflammation is bad and causes disease”, but what it should be is excessive inflammation, and certain aspects of the inflammatory cascade, not others, otherwise we get confused like that article demonstrated. Some inflammation is good and necessary, but when it gets out of control due to toxins, infections, and a poor ability to regulate it, then we have a storm on our hands.

I think so, and that, I suppose. I always worry that I don’t convey my ideas properly, especially when I am out of my area of expertise (stabbing and thievery). I do know when something is fishy, though.

Please don’t get suck into debate with these fanatic extremist bias big ego very low carb crowds. It feels like dealing with terrorist within, it is so tired and exhausted.

Compare with the no fat, low fat crowds, fanatic vegan,fanatic raw food… they are not any better maybe worst…I don’t know why they are so fearful whenever anybody says any good things about carbohydrate…

I hate to see you waste too much time and energy on these nonsenses war of words.. . Just like Steve waste too much time with Gary Taube. I want him back to write his blog the way it was before.

Maybe it is good for publicity and web traffic but time to write and read blogs is so precious in this busy world…

You wrote a lot of articles that is well balance and scientific reliable and helpful for people to improve their health so please concentrate on that.

Yes, I agree with Phuong Le about the ‘experts’ views on low carb. When I followed a low carb diet I was like them, until I discovered PHD and of course Stephen Guyenet and Kurt Harris. The low carb arguments can show you all the scientific evidence to support that claim, but it doesn’t reflect reality. My dad was a major rice eater all his life, was very lean, his tummy was as flat as a table top. He ate mostly traditional food, with occasional treats of sweets. But my mother is the opposite. She loves rice AND wheat based products AND sugar, not to mention margarine. While my dad stayed lean despite eating all that rice, he got unlucky with his lungs (he liked smoking) and eventually died of leukaemia. So what did this experience show me? That carbs per se are not the singular cause of making one fat, but a combination of toxic food and poor nutrition. My mum continues to eat traditional food, but she also continues to eat all that gluten, sugar and hydrogenated fats. She is quite big, but not obese, and is suffering from diabetes. I should have looked at my parents’ dietary behaviour first before believing that all carbs are fattening and jumping into VLC diet.

And also people refer to the Okinawans to be one of the longest living people on earth and that they eat lots of fish, pork and lard. What they didn’t say about the Okinawans is that them being also Japanese, eat rice as a staple. Why? Is it because it’s politically incorrect in the realm of low carb? I live in Tokyo and my Japanese friends eat rice day in and day out, young and old, and the majority of them are slim as the rest of the country. Is this observation not scientifically evidence enough that carbs don’t make you fat?

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